Abstract

A lot of attention is lately drawn to the measurement of implicit and explicit achievement motives as two distinct but intercorrelated systems. The general line of research indicates that correlations between the Picture Story Exercise (PSE) and self-report questionnaires which assess implicit and explicit achievement constructs respectively are normally very low and nonsignificant. The new approach to the measurement of the explicit motives violates this assumption and consists in the construction of the cue- and response-matched questionnaire version of the PSE (PSE-Q) which might correlate significantly with the PSE. The first goal of the current study was to explore this new line of thinking by constructing a PSE-Q for the measurement of the explicit achievement motive based on the original scoring key by McClelland et al. (1953) and validating it with a traditional measure of the explicit achievement motive, LMI-K (Schuler & Prochaska, 2001), as well as with academic success criterion, such as grade point average (GPA). The second goal of the current study was to increase the number of picture cues available for eliciting implicit achievement motive imagery, thus, four new picture cues were introduced in the PSE. Three personality measures—PSE, LMI-K, and PSE-Q, were completed in one testing session by the group of 134 participants online. Results indicated that all new picture cues were suitable for the measurement of the implicit achievement motive. No significant correlations were obtained between the PSE and LMI-K. Correlations between the PSE and the PSE–Q were found to be significant, whereas, LMI-K showed significant variance overlap with the PSE-Q. In line with the established research, academic success (GPA) was significanlty predicted by the explicit achievement motive measured with LMI-K. These findings suggest that implicit and explicit achievement motives are distinct but related constructs.